Thermopolitics of data: cloud infrastructures and energy futures

Abstract

This article develops the notion of a thermopolitics of data to describe an ongoing infrastructural integration of the platform economy with energy politics through the mediation of heat. Building on fieldwork conducted at a data centre owned by a major Russian digital platform that, since 2016, has been the main source of heating for the Finnish town of Mäntsälä, the article analyzes the ways in which the materialities of heat and data get mobilized by different actors to produce a new object-the data centre as a thermal urban infrastructure. Situating these processes in a history of shifting scientific and popular understandings of future fuels, and of the relation between information and energy, the article extends emergent scholarly literature on the cultures of thermal manipulation that underpin digital media. An enquiry into the thermopolitics of data illuminates the ways in which bodies and spaces are silently integrated and infrastructurally organized to simultaneously function as objects of quantification, commodification and differentiation, and the provisioning of thermal regulation and human care for these practices. In the formation of these relations, new regulatory, ethical and epistemological questions about the relationship between data, agency and energy arise.

Data sinks, carbon services: Waste, storage and energy cultures on Ireland’s peat bogs

“…This is the primary reason why we are extrapolating from largely speculative strategic plans about the direction these developments are going. While data centres are increasingly under public scrutiny, big tech companies are becoming involved in more and more facets of climate and energy politics in Ireland and far beyond (Pasek, 2019; Velkova, 2021), meaning that the environmental strategies of big tech companies in Ireland are materially entwined within an expanding global supply chain of green capitalism. The direction that regulatory and corporate frameworks around smart, green economies have travelled in the past decade tells us that more big tech intervention will dictate climate action without directed action by activists, scholars and policymakers to not only imagine but also to enact something different.…”

Data centers and the infrastructural temporalities of digital media: An introduction

“…Take, for instance, the hyperscale data center of the Russian Internet company Yandex in Finland. In operation since 2016, the data center has become a critical thermal urban infrastructure in the town of Mäntsälä, a small Finnish town close to Helsinki (Velkova, 2021). As Russia invaded Ukraine in the spring of 2022, the data center lost legitimacy and caused anxiety among the local Finnish community, which has since been trying to force its dismantling—by cutting off its power supply and forcing the facility to run on diesel for months, and by planning its disconnection from the thermal grid of the town (Noponen, 2022).…”

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“…An abstraction that transmutes a network of computational devices and their infrastructural supports into "logical objects" that can be apprehended and acted upon (Hu 2015: x). An energy-and-water-intensive, polluting, world-spanning material infrastructure that is computation's determinate site (Cubitt et al 2011;Hogan 2015;Velkova 2021). A triumph of marketing, recapitulating computation, once something one owned and managed, as something one can outsource and hire in when needed.…”